Letters from Max, published by Milkweed, is an incredible expression of grace. The shared correspondence between Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo is a moving portrait of not just how writers sharing their work and lives with one another as a community of craft building, but also how the writers become the text for one another.
 
 Max Ritvo, whose Last Voicemails we covered here, was a poet with a huge heart and a startling and daring turn of phrase, often his work is like reading only the best lines of poems you love. It’s just the illuminated path through the poem-woods to the meaning, nothing else in the confusing dark.
 
 Sarah Ruhl, playwright, and apparently shy poet, begins her relationship with Max when he applies to join her playwriting course. Quickly the teacher/student dynamic falls away and Max’s illness returns. Soon, as friends, they exchange letters — and then poems, the first for Sarah “since you are a prime mover in the poem” is Listening, Speaking and Breathing:

Here I love the way the poem is so obviously for someone, directed in the declarations: “you are not silence”. Letters from Max is about being seen, or being read. There is powerful tenderness in the way these two writers read one another and become connected through their work by putting one another in it. There’s little better than being the addressed person in a poem, other than having the addressed poem read.
 
 As such there is no conversation between two writers which is not collaboration. It’s a series of world building about soup and the afterlife, a little world bending with action — a spontaneous public reading, writing the themes of someone’s life into your play.
 
 And that’s what it reminds us, that we are often looking at the world like hungry things looking for something to sustain us. Often we enter the world in search of a way to make something more than we had at sunrise. Here though we are treated to a guide to kindness. A guide to kindness that lets us see that the way to have more of yourself at the end of the day is to have spent it giving yourself away to others.
 
 Max writes in a letter about a concept of the Good Max which lives and moves at the same time as him, in the same space, but is a little bigger, like an aura of a shell. And when he is good, he filled that space. He knew that all he had to do was to be good to others to be able to grow himself into Good Max, to become that person for the time of his goodness. I think this is the driving philosophy here, to be greater for what you give away.

Buy yourself a copy from Milkweed here

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Our Hannah has a book coming out. Full length and brimming of cleverly moving stories of absent people. I’ve read most of the stories in it and it’s ace.

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This, by Henri Cole, turned up in The Paris Review:

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This week’s song is Death by Made In Heights. I think it’s the breakbeat that does it for me.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. I wrote to Sarah Ruhl to tell her how useful the book has been to me recently, reminding there are ways to be graceful. Somehow I think that letter was better than this one. More direct. I am a little run down and aching, but extremely happy for the good things happening around me. We’re approaching a funny time of year for me, and it creeps up despite being an unmoving date. I always wonder why I get deeply sad this time of year — or rather, just “why am I like this now?”, and then I remember where we are, and that is bad in itself. Still, the world is full of good things ripening all around me ❤

It has been a busy week where I, dear reader, have not been reading enough. This is bracket week, where I tell you things between brackets instead of a proper close reading/jolly jaunt into literary wheat fields.

I am currently working through the Tor.com book (which is excellent, I am particularly enjoying The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere by John Chu — a story about a future/world where it rains on you from nowhere when you don’t tell the truth. The joy of that story isn’t that it’s a great conceit, but how it’s used by people in a terribly real way, for example, expressing an opinion in a way which is true to you means you can demonstrate how dry you are to the person you’re arguing with) and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead (which is an absolutely gripping rural noir whose William Blake influence is a joy to see threaded through. It’s got something of a-real-novel about it that feels really refreshing to me at the moment, I am ready to be dragged along with the plow).

But neither are finished enough for you. Olga is out next week, so I hope to have her solved by then.

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So, because I have so little of other people’s writing for you this week, you can have some of mine. Enjoy one of my slightly polished-up warm-up-exercise pieces. This one is a bit of a farce written in high spirits. I remember being snowed in when writing it, and I was a little giddy for that.

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The Superior Form

They’d found it. They’d found the words, finally. They slipped together like the teeth of a zip, the hands of lovers or another metaphor that we don’t really need any more because we have the words. They were perfect, and only a few lines.

It was a small statement.

For years they had tried. They tried getting children to do it. After all, they were on the lip of the snowy hill of language with their sledges ready to careen down and splash into the mucky pile of bodies in the slush. Like the rest of us already have.

For years they had tried prose, very long prose. They thought the more there was of it, the more powerful it might be. That didn’t work, and people died making it. Tragic, really, as those people never read the words in the right order.

The scientists, who do this sort of thing with ink-splotches on their lab coats, worn with contentedness — un-ironed and un-ironic — would try all sorts of form. Third person, naturally, then first, then second — and everyone thought it could be second for a long time, so they wrote another long prose attempt in second person and it sold very well, but really it was a complete failure except in the fact that it makes a satisfying sound to drop.

They tried just using very short words, just long ones, just Latin roots, just Anglo-Saxon roots, they did a lot of rooting and didn’t really get anywhere with it. Everyone had already decided it would be in English as that would be most convenient.

They should have known from the start. It would be a couple of lines of poetry.

It was funny really; they tried all those different languages, weird attempts at providing tension in a line through complex weaving of metaphor, rhyme, assonance. Someone even started talking about strophes, but everyone else thought that even this didn’t need to involve a discussion about strophes.

They had tried poetry. They tried with children, as mentioned, and they tried with very old people, thinking that somehow someone so soaked in language for all those years would be able to give them the words they needed. This soaking wasn’t the reason for wrinkles in the end.

Maybe it was still about liminality, they thought, and they had a conference about it where they invited all sorts of clever people — like linguists, philosophers, architects. It was good fun by all accounts, but they didn’t find it over that long, expensive weekend.

They asked the dead — they asked Hemingway what he thought through the Ouija board and he just asked for another drink, which shouldn’t have a been a surprise, but as it was on television with millions of people watching it felt very dramatic. Many people wondered why they thought he would know. Why not ask someone who has been dead for a very long time? And more importantly didn’t use a loaded shotgun like a couple of drinking straws to get the last slurp of milkshake from the bottom of the cup.

Obviously they asked women, eventually.

When they found it, bliss spread. The government started printing it on everything. On the sides of buses, on receipts, beer mats, the tag in your underwear.

The words fixed it — pure peace and grace and love in the soul of the reader.

The first week was chaos; the bumper stickers caused a few crashes. Mostly amicable except for the few who died swerving under a lorry’s wheels while trying to read the words in giant white type on father-Christmas red, on the tarpaulined side of the vehicle.

Still, there were words now that would make everything feel better.

Soon people became accustomed to it, and you would hear people mumbling the lines under their breath as they waited in a frustrated queue for something awful. They sang it from the terraces — and then realised that maybe peace kills a bit of the competitive edge required for Premier League football, and as such, they’d either have to stop saying the lines or stop football.

As the words spread across the world people agreed to stop killing each other quite so much and read some poetry instead. Although, of course, there was really only one poem worth reading now.

The scientists had a very long party and went back to work trying to grow a heart inside an animal that had room for an extra one. Someone commented that this was kind of the same thing, in their national newspaper column, which now ran full-page reproductions of the words with sponsor’s logos in the corner instead of adverts.

It was decided in the end that it had been a very good thing to have discovered these words, but that the world wasn’t actually that much better for it. People continued to die, go mad, and lose a hand at the mince processing factory that wasn’t caught in time and so, maybe, somewhere, someone ate a little bit of that hand in their spag-bol. The world wasn’t better on any fundamental level, but they felt better about it.

Some were disappointed in this, that it didn’t really fix anything material, but as one of the very clever people said on Newsnight, “what did you expect? It’s just poetry.”

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This week’s song is Stand Up by Hindi Zahra. I’ve no idea where this came from, but here it is :)

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Thank you for continuing to read Etch To Their Own. Normal programming should resume shortly ❤

This week is only a short missive of literary love to you all because I am a tired boy in a tired land. The things that are not worn out are soon to be and those that are worn are soon not to be at all.
 
 My recent poetry practice has involved this “searching for a lexicon to use as a poetic base” thing. It usually involves running through some outdated textbooks and plucking out those phrases that sing to you.
 
 I think Rachel de Moravia’s work in Burning House Press does a lot for this practice. It’s the idea that you can find tenderness between the roughnesses of directly useful language. You get fun lines like this: “This close-packing causes minerals of this group to be heavy and makes them difficult to scratch, causing a libidinal rush of fear spreading anarchy with no erotic subtext.” where the dry subject matter can be happily cracked open for metaphor. I think this is what I like about this practice, the way that you get to prise something open for meaning when it’s actual meaning was meant to be entirely instructional.

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So apparently there was an entire magazine of weird things that lived inside a fax machine network. It’s a cool idea to kind of dial in to find this weird junk, a very early internet experience. You can pick you way through the entire artefact here.
 
 I particularly like the layouts where there is an attempt to present part of the page as structurally raised. Oh, and early 3D graphics.

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Cotton Xenomorph has given us some great stuff recently. I like, in particular, I Want to Be the Person that Names Hurricanes by Keegan Lester.

“… A teen boy
 climbs a rafter above the subway, shimmying
 out little by little across the steel beam,
 the lightning before thunder, humidity like a kiss
 to his forehead after opening
 an oven door, to meet a woman on the ledge
 readying herself to tumble, while everyone
 continues walking toward where they hope
 they will arrive, looking up only to confirm
 they’re not the thing about to fall or be flattened.”

I like these lines about what we often think of as “the normal people” in poetry. These are the unwanted bystanders who look on at the poetic situation and don’t understand. They’re ten percent more stupid than the poet, and have no internal life — which is all the poet will ever have. In most situations, at least. Here the crowd is poetic because they want their survival in some way, it’s not really the boy that is jumping that is the subject, it’s the crowd that’s looking at him and dismissing him as not being a threat to them.

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This week’s jam has kind of only been Sigur Ros and Dawn of Midi because I have been enjoying the world of work that has deadlines. If you want to listen to Dysnomia again, and feel like you’re falling forward for 45 minutes, you can do so here. Otherwise it’s always This will never happen by Herman Dune.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. I am diligently working my way through the tor.com book and enjoying the very clever ways in which sci-fi writers express magic, hopefully I’ll have enough of it in my head for next week. Our Sammy did another poem, which I feel does clever things with the circling rhythm but I’m not really smart enough to explain it. Hannah did a cool thing in Bulgaria. Tell your friends that they too should sign up to this nonsense for it is good and full of roughage.

Mark Goodwin’s Steps is a collection to be envious of. If you’ve ever tried to write about a walk you have been on that really captures the sense of narrative you feel while on it, and failed, you will also share this feeling.
 The collection is one of purposeful walking in Wales, England, Spain, Ethiopia. What Mark captures in these poems is the sense of the sublime as Burke wrote about it. The land is not an inert thing, just moving slowly, like giant slow waves walking as you are walking on their backs.
 
 To have this, the walk must have threat; it must have a pressing sense of coming pain, for you, if there is a misstep. Mark brings this sense of looming threat in through sets of images of things being consumed by other things, like sinking fruit, or a sudden change of scale from that of a coffee bean to a bird in flight. Nature takes from you here; nature reminds you that you are part of it on these walks.

The layout of the poems is interesting too — with notational mention of location, of adding greyed-out foot-note (no pun intended).

These extra images sit alongside poems, with the direction of travel, locations (such as being in the graveyard, then the church) and provide the kind of narrative placement you need to know the poem is going somewhere. And they always do. The body is in opposition with the beautiful world surrounding it. The body’s want to exist within it is never about domination of the earth and stone, only the acceptable trespass. Later there is a desire to be blow away like fog, with the ground beneath, as if by obfuscation the body and the earth are the same thing.

Here you see the poem fade out, the dream of not existing happily becoming radio static, being everywhere, and being transmitted.
 
 Pick up Steps from Mark Goodwin and Longbarrow Press here.

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Really enjoyed the foxing here:

in a dream, I chewed my way free
 from the borough, to swallow the light,
 but all I know is the wolf he raised
 from the dead.
 I ask for a shovel to dig us out
 & he calls me fox, sly bitch,
 says I am trying to trade him for the sun.

from Portrait of the poet as her ex lovers grin by Chestina Craig in Moonchild Mag.
 
 And these crows by our Sammy:

can you come to bed?
 because the bad dreams are gathering
 and I’m not even asleep yet.
 like crows on a line
 or crowds of gulls eyeing up
 sandwiches by the sand
 human hands no match for their beaks
 these dreams watch and wait.

from Can you come to bed? In Cabildo Quarterly.
 
 Oh and these horses, by Rosebud Ben-Oni

but you don’t own one a horse, how do you know anything

— & to that no I’m not really

Asking
 Who wants to own when you can love
 Who wants anything but love
 Who but my dear spacehorse
 The only
 In which I can breathe & not worry about rent or hang-ups or titles
 Or deed just spacehorse & me
 Fucking up your Sundays & your gentle seas

from {Horse! Love! Never! Dies!} in Electric Literature.

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This week’s song is Solo by Getter Feat. Party Nails — which continues my streak of listening to squeaky sweet pop music.

And actually, also this which I’ve also had on repeat: Say something loving by The XX

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I hope to see an 800 year old tree, that has been conserved in some way since 1908 — the same year modernism landed in England inside Ezra Pound’s head. I know I’ve done that one before, but it means that people were thinking about old romantic trees that need looking after at the same time as new things were springing. I don’t know what and why this is and I hate it. Tell me about love. Actually, don’t, there’s this twitter thread that has it covered. I feel that I am full of all the good words, but that I am too tired to use them. I hope I have been writing them down as they come. I know I wrote some down like this today, rushing room to room looking for a pen, then for something to write on. I could feel the good words slipping away like sand in hourglasses as I did. Enjoy your bank holiday if you’re having one, the best thing to do is to be happy with how little there is to be done.

Ada Limon’s The Carrying is a poetry collection of wanting and possession. Major themes of her childlessness and the desire for absent men, plants, life, carry through every poem. There is deft control here, nature is evoked, but it is gardened, it is wild but not hungry like a wolf, more like the strains of a hungry child.

There’s a sense of healing throughout, that there are normal things to do in life that make times stable and give us time to fully work through our traumas. Yes, there are always things missing, yes, not everything is in place, but just existing with other people is pretty good.

There are dreams too. Dream poetry has a places a little like translation, in that there is something really telling about the way that the author decides to present the underlying messages. You can’t talk about dreams without evoking Freud (I guess he invented dreams?) because even in the talking you’re interpreting. So when Ada writes of a dream about a giant crow’s head poking out from a tree at her, you know the subject has a subtext which she is presenting to you already analysed.

“I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl”

And that’s where the magic is in these poems — there’s no howling. There’s no rage at loss and there’s no madness presented in the moment. Instead there is the reflection. Everything passed back to the reader through a mirror, a well lit photograph. In that there stands out powerful lines that will knock you down if you’re not ready for them, which often you’re not.

The poet is in control of what she is presenting here, the feelings and the pain are those that have been processed in some way. Anything left out for you to cut yourself on was meant to be there. This isn’t to suggest sterility, or any kind of detachment, just the full embrace of knowing your own life and then presenting it back fully and nakedly — without shame or guilt.

Pick it up from Milkweed Editions here.

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Kaveh talks about his rejections in the #ShareYourRejections tag — and it’s a good thread that is full of self understanding.

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Sam did a good tweet, you should RT it.

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Cathy Ulrich brings us another kind of otherwomaning in this little story about the ballerina that’s fucking your husband.

I like this story for the powerful sympathy and respect for the ballerina in it.

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Salo Press has opened up for chapbooks of up to 32 pages, named, saucily, The Flirtations.

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This week’s song is… a live set from Floating Points on KEXP. It’s like the electronica you’d expect from floating points with a really jazzy inflection, so I love it. Pretty wicked guitar solos too.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. Hopefully getting through this lovely thing from Longbarrow this week, so consider yourself trailed. I wrote this while waiting for someone and then went for important drinks. This is very on brand for me. The drinks were perfect as was the company — the not unexpected effect of snatching time away from the week.

Annie Earnaux’s memoir is a strange memory-object to contend with. It recounts the years of her life between birth and now in a broad and structural way that is deeply familiar. This familiarity comes from the years in question being those lived by baby boomers, probably the most culturally over-represented epoch of civilisation for a few centuries (dear social historians, please write to correct me).

They used to refer to my generation as “echo-boomers”, and now refer to us (and much younger people) as millennials. That old naming convention tells us a little bit more though — that the 90s and early 00s was seen as the fullest ascent of boomers, and we were meant to be as privileged as they were. Of course this isn’t quite how it has ended up as being read, although there are similarities.

As such my reading of this memoir was one of deep familiarity. It is the story of the majority cultural force of post-1945. It’s the reason why you still hear songs from the 50s at Christmas time.

My copy hung around with me a while, even in the rain.

You can see the creaking of French empire in the first half, with Algiers, and how this rustles under a safe and mostly undisturbed life like ice sheets rubbing.

There’s the invention of the teenager, masturbation, want in a repressed society that is slowly stripped away. Later, like a wave that follows the initial break Ernaux finds herself able to re-evaluate her teenage years as one of intellectual liberty that can be used as tools to open up herself. This is the 70s. As with all of us, we are surprised we are getting old.

And all of it is deeply familiar. It echoes the sounds of my childhood, the stories that were around at the time, of similar childhoods. They’d created a new image of it you see. You can only break the dam once it was supposed.

The Years, told through various medium of looking at the self, often through describing pictures, through watching the self move on film for the first time — enchanted — brings a kind of softness to all of that can only be seen as nostalgia. But with it the language searches for detachment, it distances and makes the writer and her peers. There is a search for a kind of personal objectivity — as if this memory object could be shared amongst everyone as canon.

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I have had some poetry published in Soft Cartel. I’m surprisingly proud of them and have thoroughly enjoyed being brave.

I also like updating my /writing page on my website with these things. Remember all your favourite unparseable passages from my literary career with this handy box-set.

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“as it veers toward loss and the long past
that lodge with us, you press toward love,”

This was shared by Tom Snarsky today. For My Husband by Ellen Bryant Voigt:

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What’s your favourite poem that uses repetition heavily? Answers on a tweet to Sammy.

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Hiromi Suzuki had poetry in Perverse — a way to have someone send you poetry on a Monday, if you can’t wait until Friday.

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This week’s song is East Harlem by Beirut

Another rose wilts in East Harlem
And uptown downtown a thousand miles between us
She’s waiting for the night to fall
Let it fall, I’ll never make it in time

I bit my tongue singing this on the way to see someone. There was enough blood for me to wonder if there was a main artery in the tongue.

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. It was written by @CJEggett who has been having oddly domestic daydreams recently. The daydreams remain mad; they’re just quaintly set, paced for a long life. I haven’t said for a while, but you know if you wanted to say something to me (like that you loved that poem, that there is a typo in my name, I asked you to hold something for me while I did something else and it’s been years now), you can always reply to these emails. I answer everyone.

I was very kindly sent a copy of Nu-Lit’s Micro/Macro zine some weeks ago, and I managed to spend some time with it today.
 
 The zine is one that showcases these very small texts, often in the context of an image.
 
 Here’s a favourite, by j.holth:

or this by Heather Ash:

Or this by Maynard:

It’s interesting to me that often we’re searching for the concreteness of image in our poetry and writing. We’re always looking for the hardest most touchable version of what we’re offering the reader, and yet, as is the case here, using an actual image brings about less certainty.
 
 I suppose this is because it’s two kind of interpretations which have to be parsed separately and then melded together to make sense. In some cases you can happily hold on to a kind of punning, but there’s more to dig out of the play between image and imagery.
 
 You can pick up copies of Micro/Macro here.

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I really like the rubber tombstones here, somehow irreverent and extremely metal

And the power of darkness moving up the nail — as if it were a kind of sundial, but on that is intentionally designed to snuff out progress in one swift, sharp, whack.

~~~

Rosebud Ben-Oni, has a new poem out in Tin House. This time the poet is wrestling with starhorse in the dark. Here’s a snippet:

There’s a more urgent tone here compared to recent poems — a real gripping of the mane. It seems to be exploring the way outwardly we have to be torn by obligation whereas inwardly we’re simple and changed — a war between shared and personal narratives.

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This week’s song is Andrew Bird and Fiona Apple’s Left Handed Kisses

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. This boy is tired and so are his hands — having hardened by recently returning to the content mines. I know right. I have some poems appearing in Soft Cartel on the 6th, which might be a Monday, for those of you who are fans of assuming the day of a date. It’s more of the same really, but there’s a nice image or two in the soup I am sure.

I come to your table and tell you that this week’s newsletter will be tapas style. You ask if it if going to be in a Catalan, Valencian or Galician style — because these are what you would expect when your waiter says such things. You’re a little surprised, it wasn’t a tapas bar last week. No, I explain, it’s the same kind of thing as before (tasty morsels, badly described), but what we serve comes out in whatever order, size and heat the chef feels up to at that moment because he’s dreadfully unorganised. You sigh because, well, it’s late anyway, so you might as well have something of a newsletter.

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A slightly unshared poem by Kaveh Akbar from earlier in the year (with thanks to Ben Read): I Wouldn’t Even Know What To Do With A Third Chance is a poem about the graceful losing grace, it contains the assumption of having had grace to start with and knowing its shape at all.

Of course it has those lines that sing like bells in your brain: “A failure of courage is still a victory of safety” and those lines given two meanings by being split — the food and watering the dead, then transforming that in to orchids. Which is a sign of the ritual we use poetry for, to say that watering the orchids at night is the same as tending to our dead or to our grief. We create power with language, in a shape and full of grace and then transpose it into a living action so we may carry it out into our lives.
 
The third chance is meaningless because we are always taking a chance by creating an idea with language and then slipping it into the mud of reality so we can feel it beyond the page. The fall from grace is essential as it is what lets us live in the real world, rough shaped and grazed.

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I quite like second person narratives, and if you do too I suggest you let others know here. It’s the natural addressing tone of poetry, so for me it’s got its obvious strengths — confessional and confiding, direct. It is the way we tell stories anyway, to someone, to a reader, even if we’re not addressing them. Think of those Lorrie Moore stories we looked at — the lightness that can be had by bringing the “you” into the narrative. The unnamed other that is important enough to be a “you” that provides some kind of voyeuristic pleasure while being able to obscure the truth of a story. The you is a little camouflage which the truth of a work can be interestingly obscured by.

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Million Pound Clouds by Ben Slotky published in Spelk is a nice example of second person narration:

I enjoy the swirl of images, the repetition, and the normalcy of it. There’s humanity and warmth in its distractedness; “The person she is talking to isn’t paying attention” and “He looks like other people look” put us no closer to the grit of the scene but place us entirely within its feeling. There’s a fun juxtaposition that waltzes back and forth of the sublime idea of heavy clouds, then only being able to see gathering dust — despite trusting that there are heavy clouds — and then that all dust is just people swelling together into sublime heavy clouds.

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This week’s songs are Graceless by The National

“I’m trying, but I’ve gone
 Through the glass again
 Just come and find me
 God loves everybody, don’t remind me”

And Lua by Bright Eyes

“And I know you have a heavy heart
 I can feel it when we kiss
 So many men stronger than me
 Have thrown their backs out trying to live”

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I found a poet at my new job. There’s always at least one. She runs most of it on instagram under the excellent handle @itcouldbeverse

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I come back three times while you’re eating to ask if you’re food is well while chewing on very nice poetry that was very well cooked actually but impossibly badly described. You’re happy to have eaten and then it’s impossible to get my attention to pay the bill. I seem to be shutting the restaurant. You’re polite and wait, but when I switch off the light and you hear the back door being unlocked you finally say something about how weird it’s been. As a way of excusing myself I say that I have been writing a lot of poetry recently, and that’s very distracting. Of course there was never going to be a bill, I am not sure what you were waiting for.

Returning to a sadly departed talent, I have been enjoying Max Ritvo’s upcomming posthumous The Final Voicemails. Edited by Louise Glück and published by Milkweed Editions, this is a tender collection of poetry that move in and out of focus around the end of his life.
 
 Endlessly shifting between the pain of existing in a body and a bright potential of living beyond as an idea. Forever there is a solid reality in the poetry which is then pushed against by the quick hard souls of the feet out into the lightness of space. It’s what you expect, dreaming of being ripples out there in the world beyond your own existence.

It this joyous search for the good existence beyond your own that strikes a chord with me. For example, when you’re nothing you’re everything — and so you are everything you love too.

And this is mixed in with classical references. The posed question of how time feels to Atlas — a man with a big burden might see it as unimportant. He looks instead at the sheep devouring the sweating plants — so much effort into giving life, to be eaten by one another. Delphi is asked not what the gods think, but what she thinks, in a flirtation.

The collection was read in my favourite kind of moment — those snatched from someone else. But in this I felt a little greedy — every shiver from a line not really belonging to me, because it belongs to everyone.
 
 The Final Voicemails is out on 11th September from Milkweed Editions

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I had some poems published in Terror House Magazine — they’re a bit weird and panicked, but I think they say what I wanted to say. I’ve grown to love the feelings a little better.
 
 This is also a recent culmination of trying to use techniques discussed by some of my favourite poets, and I am hoping the roots show.

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Sam also had a few pieces in Terror House Magazine this week, all of which I am in love with. Really clever structure and use of repetition, wordplay and, er, sauciness.

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In other ctrl+f news, there happened to be this this week in Eunoia Review by Catherine Kyle: This One Easy Keyboard Shortcut Will Change Your Life

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This week’s song is Heartbeats by The Knife

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Thank you for reading Etch To Their Own. It was written by @CJEggett — the devil on your shoulder. It has been a good week for writing, but I have also found myself a job — so it is also a good time for confusingly retaining information in jumbled orders. Remember, you can always run away tomorrow. Next week I hope to be covering The Years by Annie Ernaux. My love is yours, frazzles, crispy, and shattering under enthusiastic forking.

Note: I am quoting from an advance copy of the book, and the final version may contain changes. I’d also like to mention that I will be lightly spoiling this very ancient text — I enjoyed a great deal of it because I had no idea what would be happening next.
 
We’re all looking for an audience — someone to really see us, someone to be a fan of our work. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have something you’ve created be appreciated.
 
Even gods worry about this — after all, if you’re not being prayed to and sung about, how will your name live on forever? That’s certainly why I write these newsletters, so I may live forever in your promotions tab.
 
The Popol Vuh, translated from the K’iche’ by Michael Bazzett is the Ancient Mayan creation myth and starts with such a problem for a god. A little like Hesiod’s Theogony, our deity is an Ur-deity that exists as a kind of everything in two bodies which build the world through conversation. It’s workshopping a good idea into a great one.
 
They begin with the usual canvas of nothing and fill it out in the usual way — language brings forth life which is directly connected to them, the former and the shaper. There are a few beautiful turns within the very light and bouncing text:

Then the problems begin — they make animals, which are insufficient to praise them because they only bark and tweet (you can fill in the rest of the farmyard yourself). The animals are punished by being tasty. Next they try making people from wood, and then mud — each less than satisfactory and ending with the golems being smashes up by woodland creatures. And then it is realised that there are beings in this world that are making claims to being gods, despite simply being something more like Ancient Greek Titans, and this will stop them finding the necessary materials to make true humanity.
 
 This is when the two heroic twins arrive (or always were?), Hunahpu and Xblanque, born in a mixed version of eve in the Garden of Eden (if she was from a form of the underworld) and the immaculate conception of Mary. They go about more or less tidying up all these odd usurpers of the natural and intended order — but the reasons and ways that it happens are magnificently farcical. There’s something about the way that these two approach everything as a game because of their ability to shape the world around them that makes for a similar feeling to when you read magical realism. You’re simply asked to go along with the text. So, you have a giant being tempted into a shallow cave with a crab made of leaves only for the twins to convince the mountain to sit on him. You have the worst version of email being used to convey a message from the grandmother to the twins: telling your message to a louse which, in an attempt to be quicker, accepts being eaten by a frog, which is eaten by a snake, which is eaten by a falcon — who all then have to expel their passenger to pass on the message. The presentation is this:

The message itself is an invitation of an equivalent of hell, because currently the twins are playing a ball game above and causing quite a racket. As such the lords of this underworld would like to invite them to play a game with them with the intention of killing them. It’s certainly one way to deal with the flat above. The games are interspersed with a series of trials, and the eventual unwinding of these (which includes a decapitation and a marrow replacement, which is fine apparently for the interim) has such a playful joy that you’re happy to go along with the light touch.
 
The language in the poem has a certain lightness to it, a matter-of-factness that is required for words that are myth. The interspersion of comically terse and colloquial dialogue is also a treat — demanding nothing of the reader other than to come along for the ride. I read the entire thing in one sitting and found it’s pace and strangeness delicious.
 
The poem concludes with the god finally deciding what the right substance is to create true humans, and then deciding what to give them — originally as powerful as gods, seeing all, they were not particularly good at seeing who to praise. As such the gods made them more short sighted. Someone once said (tweeted?) that most novel writers seem to write about protagonists who are exactly like the writer but 10% less intelligent. I feel that’s what’s going on here, looking for the perfect vessel for your desire to be seen.
 
The poem ends with the people of the earth calling for the first sunrise, finally.
 
 The Popol Vuh, translated by Michael Bazzett is published on October 9th 2018 — pre-order it here.

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Chen Chen doing really interesting work over here with an erasure of Michael Derrick Hudson’s poems. (If you don’t remember Michael Derrick Hudson is the white chap who pretended to be Asian to get published)

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I had three things published in Eunoia Review: You Are Good For Poetry, Relearning All My Lines, and Back From The Flood.
 
Relearning all my lines was a bit of a stab at tying to capture the rhythm of Chen Chen’s In The Hospital and everyone seems to like the iphone line from Back From The Flood.
 
I have two poems going up in Terror House Magazine next Tuesday/Wednesday. They’re both a bit weird, so hopefully they’re at least readable.

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This week’s song is Maribou State feat. Holly Walker — Midas

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Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, I write this for you and you alone, everyone else is just a happy mistake. I’ve recently been offered a chance to return to the world of work, which is a joy, but I would expect my newslettering to become a little scattier (or more organized by necessity, we dream). I hope your weekend stretches before you lazily with the promise of rest and at least the thought of some kind of delicious treat. Mine certainly does.